Social interactions like Twitter retweets and mentions, Facebook shares, likes, and comments, etc. are called social signals.
With the rise of social sites like Facebook and Twitter, search engines like Google and Bing now take into account a range of social signals when determining a website’s ranking.
Note: Google encourages businesses to build their brand on social media as a long-term investment to drive qualified traffic, rather than aiming for short-term benefits like search ranking placement. Google’s own head of its web spam team Matt Cutts has stated that Google takes a cautious approach when it comes to social media, as so many things change quickly on social media. Without a full ‘map,’ Google is understandably reticent to assign too much importance to social signals over other aspects of their search algorithm. In short, Google’s strategy is a sensible one - “wait and see” how things develop over time, as websites that provide true value normally develop longevity, trust and authority, and these are the websites that Google naturally wants to rank higher in its search engine listings.
Social Signal Sources
Social media sites that search engines look to when measuring social signals include:
With almost 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most dominant social media network in the world. It has been estimated that an average post can reach over 100,000 users, so even if no one seems to be buying your products or services on Facebook, don’t be quick to dismiss the power of leveraging Facebook, as Google uses data and information from Facebook when determining your search rankings. In fact, Facebook seems to have the most influence on search rankings of all social media sites, like Google+ and Twitter.
(Number of monthly active Facebook users. Source: Statista.com)
After Facebook, Twitter is the next biggest social media site in the world, with over 600 million tweets sent out each day. Twitter plays a significant role as a global influencer online and places great emphasis on tweeting posts that provide great value to readers over the number of tweets sent …
(Over half a billion tweets are sent each day. Source: InternetLiveStats.com)
Google Plus
Google’s own social site naturally carries a significant degree of authority online, even if it is still a fledgling online community compared to sites like Facebook and Twitter.
(More people are interacting on Google+ every day. Source: InternetLiveStats.com)
In addition to the big three social media giants listed above, there are a number of other social sites that provide important social signals, like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.
(Social media sites provide important signals to search engines that can affect your rankings)
Social Signals – Which Ones Should You Be Paying Attention To?
Social signals tracked by search engines like Google and Bing include:
- Facebook – e.g. how many Facebook likes, comments, and shares a person has, growth rate of shares and likes, etc.
- Twitter – e.g. tweets and retweets, the authority of the person sharing your posts, trending topics, etc.
- Google+ – e.g. who is following you (high profile users), how many people are following you, amount of adds and shares, etc.
- Other sites – e.g. growth rate of Pins and re-Pins on Pinterest, upvotes on Digg, etc.
- Not so obvious signals – In addition to the above, there are other not so obvious social media-related factors that can influence search engine traffic and rankings. These include desirable and negative factors, such as improving clickthrough rate (CTR) [positive], and whether your site is deemed to be of poor quality by other users [negative].
As a business owner, it’s not only important to grow your social media presence, but also to be able to monitor and analyze your social signals in order to improve your business results.
(Use social media marketing to help improve your business results)
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, identify market opportunities, and help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, brands, topics, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to monitor social media channels like blogging, forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Medium, etc., discussion boards, video sites, and user-generated content is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by a cross-section of people including digital reputation managers, marketing professionals, market research, sales teams, social engagement and community staff, and agencies. Typically, small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately many service providers have made available affordable tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to track consumer behavior around your products or brand so you can react to conversations and engage with online users in a timely manner.
We have created a detailed article listing several social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. Go here to learn more:
(Are you looking for an effective way to measure your social signals?)
In this article, we review a simple, yet effective social media tracking plugin for WordPress and increasing your social media influence online.
Introducing …
Social Metrics Pro – Social Media Analytics For WordPress
Plugin Description
Social Metrics Pro is an easy-to-use social media analytics plugin that is designed to help users improve their social media exposure in an uncomplicated way. It is built on a simple concept – the system measures and tracks how each signal is performing and returns either a green or red indicator. Your task is to change all the reds into greens.
(Social Metrics Pro provides a system that any user can operate … turn reds into greens!)
Colors indicate relative popularity. This simplifies your social analytics with Excel-like conditional color formatting. Posts with highest number of shares show up green. Posts with low social media activity are colored amber or red.
The plugin developers tested Social Metrics Pro on a network of over two thousand sites over a period of three months. During this period, all they focused on was turning the “reds” to “greens” and then keeping everything “green”. According to the plugin developers, they were able to notice that their top 10 best performing sites saw an improvement of up to 360% more traffic, 410% more keywords ranked in the first page of Google and their revenue increased by 310%.
(According to Social Metrics Pro developers, improving your social marketing can significantly can have a dramatic impact on your search rankings, traffic and revenue!)
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Social Metrics Pro
Below are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Social Metrics Pro to track Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and more directly from your WordPress Dashboard on your web site:
Quick And Easy To Install And Implement. Ready To Start Using In Very Little Time.
SocialMetricsPro installs just like every WordPress plugin. Simply upload the plugin file to your Plugin folder via your WordPress administrator login and activate.
Really Simple To Use
As mentioned earlier, the site owner’s job is to turn reds into greens. Social Metrics Pro tracks and measures social signals so you know which social marketing campaigns need more effort and which campaigns need to be better optimized.
Select Only Signals You Care About
Social Metrics Pro lets you monitor social activity across leading networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, StumbleUpon, Digg, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Social Metrics Pro helps you get answers to questions like:
- Which social media networks work best for my site?
- Which posts are performing the best on these social networks?
- Which are my most popular posts?
- And more …
With SocialMetricsPro, all of this information is available on-demand, with a single click.
(SocialMetricsPro constantly monitors the sites that you care most about!)
Features
Social Metrics Pro provides WordPress users with a number of features. Below we have listed just some of these features:
- Fast and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in very little time.
- Widgets & Extensions Ready. You can extend the plugin’s functionality with external and built-in widgets. Social Metrics Pro displays the latest stats from your WP admin bar, display popular content on your sidebar or anywhere in your site using point-and-click widgets.
- One-click upgrades. You can update Social Metrics Pro with one click via the WordPress Updates page, or update it manually. You can also opt to receive an email notification when a new version is released.
- Minimal use of hosting resources. Reporting is fast, consuming minimal hosting resources. Reports also include the amount of time used to retrieve information and the server memory used to gather and compile data.
Additional features include:
- Sort, Search And Filter Features: Social Metrics Pro allows you to sort, search and filter information however you like. You can perform keyword searches to study posts related to certain topics, and even filter the results by post type, publishing date, category, or post authors.
- Export Data To Excel: You can export filtered, sorted data and custom queries to Excel for further analysis. Data can be exported in tab-delimited and comma-separated file formats, and imported to Excel or the spreadsheet application of your choice.
(SocialMetricsPro is simple to use … just change reds into greens!)
Testimonials
Here are a couple of the testimonials and comments users have written about the Social Metrics Pro plugin:
”Our entire marketing strategy relies on social media. Each post on the site has viral potential, but we needed one place to see which social networks are performing the best for us…We went ahead and got the PRO Version of Social Metrics.” Syed Balkhi, Founder of List25 and WPBeginner.com
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”If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve.” Goes one of the most important sayings in business. And this is particularly true for tracking of your social mentions I found. There were two things that helped me a great deal to increase sharing after installing Social Metrics: First, I was able to see that some of my articles would perform much better on networks I wasn’t particularly using, such as StumbleUpon for example. Secondly, I could filter out the best performing content more easily and analyse what makes my readers share. Since then I have focused strongly on producing and replicating those posts that performed best.” Leo Widrich, Co-Founder of Buffer
Useful Tips
Social Metrics Pro comes with a practical guide containing useful advice on how to optimize your site for social media success (i.e. how to turn reds into greens).
Support
Social Metrics Pro is well-supported, and comes with free lifetime updates and support, backed by a no-risk, 60-day, complete refund guarantee.
Plugin Price
SocialMetricsPro plugin is available in two editions:
- Single Site License – This allows you to configure Social Metrics Pro on a single web site. Includes free lifetime updates and free support. Cost = $27.00 (one-time).
- Unlimited Sites Licensing – This edition lets you install SocialMetricsPro on unlimited sites that you own. Pricing includes free lifetime updates and free support. Cost = $47.00 (one-time).
Please Note: Price details for SocialMetricsPro depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. The price shown above was current at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price set by the product seller when you visit the plugin website and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after your purchase.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details:
Additional Product Information
SocialMetricsPro requires a self-hosted installation of WordPress and can be instantly downloaded after purchase.
In Conclusion
As mentioned earlier, with the rising importance of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, search engines have started taking into account various social signals to help determine website ranking.
No website owner can afford to ignore the importance of social media. Social Metrics Pro solves the problem of how to find a simple, time-saving solution that gives you immediate feedback on the success of your social marketing campaigns and guides you where and how to direct your efforts in order to improve your results.
Social Metrics Pro is ideal for beginners and advanced users alike. It tracks Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and more right from your WP admin area.
Get SocialMetricsPro if you own or manage WordPress sites and would like to see measurable results.
For more details, visit the plugin website: Social Metrics Pro – Social Media Analytics Plugin For WordPress
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